Mi presente perfecto | 1999 - 2000

P.B. | 2001 - 2004

About the series

From themes of sexual violence, the artist exposes herself in order to raise ethical suspicions regarding the gaze. “Prohibido violar” [Rape Prohibited] reads the inscription that she holds up in front of the camera. As Spinoza said with provocative common sense, if I am prohibited from doing something, it is because is something that I can do. It is the prohibition that introduces the menace of violation into the scene. The ambiguity of the defiant, vulnerable character is transferred to the viewer, seduced and guilty. The image is both tense and beautiful, well targeted and disturbing.

Several of the images include objects that denote the asepsis of medical and scientific devices: while underwear is destined to dress and protect private parts, a glove serves to cover a criminal’s tracks; or as in one of the self-portraits, an oppressive bandage is used to “erase” the anatomical evidence of a female body.

In another image in P.B., instead of showing us her back (that other side of beauty) Ananké Asseff turns her back on us. The firmness of this almost tangible reluctance charges our gaze with violence. By turning her back on us in front of a strict, white plane –almost like a prisoner up against a wall- the artist’s gaze is directed outside the frame but rebounds like an energy contained within the exitless space to challenge us. The tension in the situation evoked lies in the fact that the body and between those legs cannot be fixed in the place of object so long as there are eyes that return the gaze.

Retazos del paraiso | 2004

About the series

Body and landscape are essential components of the Retazos del paraíso[Remnants of paradise] series. To conceive it, she took sceneries close to her affections, her family environment and growth experiences. In her work, nature becomes a place of discoveries and learning, sometimes painful and intimidating. Ignoring our gaze, the artist is melted harmoniously with the idyllic landscape that surrounds and contains her. The moment of the day, the chosen place and the scale in which she is placed accompany corporal attitudes that accentuate sensations and suggest that the landscape, even in its splendor, can become desolating or threatening. The sites with which empathy relationships can be established, becomes a refuge that, nevertheless, maintains its condition of indomitable outdoor.

Antonella | 2004

Retrato de mi familia | 2005

About the series

To construct the work between the pose and the pause. To construct the wait and hold the panic at bay is hard work. To show your face and put your body on the spot is an attitude. The pose is choreography in suspense. The pause edits the work’s threat; the work in terms of a diluted threat. Those portrayed are subjects only because they simultaneously hold a tool for cutting and accelerating time. The photographic apparatus and the weapon have the trigger and shutter mechanism in common.

Potencial | 2005 - 2007

About the series

The theme in Asseff’s work is paranoia. In Potencial [Potential], the artist disappears as the main character and the handling of violence goes beyond sexual implications. Ananké Asseff photographed and filmed people who live with firearms in their houses.

These pieces do not allude to the degree of danger as a concrete phenomenon, but to what extent concern over the lack of safety took on a very concrete presence at a particular historical moment, in which the communication media had established it as an important line of discourse. The construction of a discourse of danger originates forms of subjectivity that are articulated in relation to the feeling of fear. It also generates specific forms of behavior. Tasks of control are distributed by capillary action to each and every citizen, and there is a preventative isolation between people: every other becomes suspect.

The title refers to states of suspense. The danger is there, not as an occurrence, but as a hypothesis. It is the supposition of imminent danger that charges these scenes with tension, scenes that on the other hand are resolved as familiar, domestic scenarios in accordance with portraiture’s classic typology. These are people from the middle class and upper middle class, confronting the popular belief that associates the possession of weapons to the lower class. In words of the artist, “I was also in front of them with a gun: my camera”

Vigilia | 2005 - 2007

About the series

Everyday habits are modified by the imagery of risk and refuge. The video language in Vigilia [Vigil] allows us to perceive a slow distillation of this empty, exasperating time. These characters are subordinated two-fold, by the proximity of a weapon and by the camera that films them. Like some kind of household cold war, the aggressiveness implicit in the immobile expectation of self-defense conduct falls into the same rhythm as the passing of the night.

Contemplación I | 2005 - 2006

About the art-work

The temporal nature of the film support allows Asseff to further unfold the device. In the first scene, the artist herself is seated before a lake in a forest that generously opens before her eyes. The scene affirms beauty as a state of wholeness that is foreign to us. If, as a viewer, I keep myself at a preventative distance, the scene survives, it is maintained. If I approach it, a sensor activates a second scene in the video: the woman turns around and looks at the viewer. As in the mythological narratives of surprised nymphs, we feel our gaze as if it was a rapture. Proximity is a threat. Sensor: censor. Our desire to look makes us responsible for having disrupted that intimate paradise. Nevertheless, this rupture is inevitable. The intrinsic co-existence of the landscape’s beauty and the threat evolves in the scene itself.

Rueda de Reconocimiento | 2007

About the series

While on the one hand the title is a literal description of the police procedure used to identify criminals that the installation replicates, on the other hand it calls attention to symbolic associations that are set into motion by implicating the viewer in a play of mirrors. In the video-installation we recognize five individuals with their backs to us in life size, standing side by side. When the interactor enters the space -and the range of the sensors- all the five individuals turn around to face him or her, while their faces remains in shadow (lineup of suspects). Suddenly, these individuals pull out their (concealed) guns, aim and fire straight ahead at the viewer-interactor. When they finish firing, the individuals put their guns away and turn around, returning to their original position, with their backs to the interactor (firing squad lineup).

The circular aspect of the rueda [translator’s note: a literal translation of the title would be round of recognition] becomes a perturbing reversibility between victims and victimizers. It is not articulated in order to identify a single suspect, but to warn us that we are all (us and them) tangled up in the same web as the discursive objects of an ubiquitous, anonymous system based on reproducing fear.

Constelaciones | 2011

About the art-work

In the video-performance entitled Constelaciones [Constellations] ten people are standing in an enclosed space. Suddenly, water begins to stream in under pressure, flooding it. There are variations in temperature, wind and light. The people don’t know how long the action will last or how far the water will rise. The only indication is “to resist”.

Corrimientos | 2009 - 2011

About the series

In this set of works that belong to the Corrimientos [Shifts] series, the menace and the danger are more indeterminate than in previous series. An impassive man faced to a tiger that does not attack him, a gigantic wave ready to break over/on the viewer and a half-hidden mural landscape, talk about changes, shifts and fears. The constructed -perhaps invented – fear, the lack of safety that moves us and the anguish in the face of the unknown are configured by Ananké through an approach to what is felt and a game between illusion, fantasy and construction.

Certain themes or situations that were already present in determined photographs emigrated to new formats, such as sculpture or installation. Aside from the surprise that this other “shift” may have caused in a public used to cataloging Ananké Asseff as a “photographer”, a profound conceptual coherence provides these diverse pieces with a sense of unity. The menacing potential of the large wave of mud comes from the sensation of a moment that has been frozen or brought to a halt, identical to the capture of a photograph. The male figure in Despertando al tigre [Waking the tiger] also presents an intrinsic link with photography’s genesis. The confrontation between the young man and the tiger occurs at a moment is simultaneously singular and eternal.

Bardo | 2012

About the series

The meaning that most captivated Asseff’s thoughts is that which comes from El libro tibetano de los muertos [The Tibetan Book of the Dead]: there, bardo designates a vital intermediate state, of transition between the known and the unknown. This is precisely the zone of risk, the abyss of sorts that opens up between one link and the next in this artist’s creative process. The characters are authentic agonists, they are locked in a struggle whose cause and aims are unknown to us; nevertheless, we feel its intensity. There is something beastly that echoes throughout the scene where human beings and horses mingle. It may be this ambiguous moment of lucidity, blindness and illumination that winds up being embodied in the sculpture of the young mare emerging from the primordial earth or irremediably sinking into it.

Contemplación II | 2013

Campos de realidad I | 2013

About the series

In the three parts project entitled Campos de realidad [Fields of reality], the artist worked with natural landscapes without references. These are sites that the viewer cannot recognize because she aims not to distract them with information that is not relevant, but to engage them in a strong way with the project’s proposal. Ambiguous, mysterious, is the absence of event created by Ananké Asseff. In the idyllic landscapes, there was (is) a situation occurring, but it was carefully concealed.

In the first part of the project, the main scene is hidden behind a gray geometric shape. The play between the shape and the landscape background is for sure beautiful. Yet, between the photographic print and the painted glass on its inner side, a slight but considerable distance filters, which invites us to suspect that something has been hidden. By covering the evidence we acknowledge that behind it, there is an intact image. The gesture of covering is for avoiding someone to follow the trace of what was there, of what has happened. The beauty then becomes enigmatic.

Years ago, Asseff has been working on gaze ethics. Covering the evidence is another way of questioning the documentary objectivity and to assume a deconstruction of the supposed “innocence” of the image, in the sense that it always involves an ethical complicity of the gaze.

Campos de realidad II | 2014

“What we have in front of us and we can not see. It is a matter of highlighting (by denial) a scene by concealing it (yet knowing that it is there).

Folding is an action calculated based on an existing image. It is a matter about exploring the specific relationship between the original image, the applied gesture and its presentation space.

We generate “realities” wherever there are fringes of information that we do not see. This “folding gesture” somehow highlights the fact of how the imagination of the viewer tends to complete that hidden fringe, completing the meaning of that “reality” with what each one projects from its own subjectivity.”

Campos de realidad III | 2015

About the series

As in the previous parts of the project Campos de realidad [Fields of reality], Ananké Asseff works with a particular gesture on each of the photographs: she paradoxically highlights (by denial) the scenes, through its concealments.

In the third part of the project the artist allegedly manipulates and alters the rigidity of the medium. By folding the photographic paper onto itself – given the specificity of each image – she creates simple and geometric shapes. Thus, the folding makes itself present and the “real” of photography (its medium) threatens to occupy spaces of representation.

In this way, the landscape loses much of its mimetic power and its capacity to provide a point of reference as a representation of a particular space. The image acquires a re-signification by stripping the materiality of the medium and by breaking the nature of the landscape as such. Margins of photographs irrupt into the centrality of the landscape to break the classical order by transforming the periphery into a new field of reality.

There is also a political-social aspect in the result of the gesture. The way in which the reality is hidden has to do with the modality of the one who performs the act of concealment.

Soberbia | 2016

The artworks that compose this series are conceited with themselves. They demand us an effort to perceive, recognize and understand them. Its connotations are endless and multilateral at once.

Its vision includes more than the physical fact of seeing or displaying something. These artworks are part of a communication process, a thought in images, a subjective expression, a (political) position.

Spite its alleged simple flat gray appearance, the artworks that compose this series bear an analogue universe behind. The artist expresses the experienced pain in her preferred medium, photography, in a conceptualization that goes from inductive to deductive thinking.

The occluded images disturb our eyes in an act of dispossession and an apparent search for abstraction. This perturbation results in an attempt of transgression of the imposed limits on the valuation of a plane as well as transforming the experience into a reflection of oneself, above the others. What we see gives us the key to access the complexity of character and content of the visual intelligence proposed by Asseff.

Who is the victim and who the victimizer? Arrogant attitude in the confrontation itself. Unbearable attitude. Unbearable for the body, for the eyes, unbearable image that refuses to be seen, and in stead, it provokes us. It is reflected in the silence, haughty silence, present among and within the artworks that delves into the nature of the visual experience through explorations, analysis and definitions leading us to the very limit of the dialectic of the vision or not-vision. This fact magnifies the ability of both creators and receivers of visual messages.

Bio

She has represented Argentina in international biennials such as La Habana (2010). She has been awarded with distinctions and received many acknowledgements, such the Rioplatense Award for Visual Arts, by OSDE Foundation (2004), Leonardo Prize to Photography, by the Argentinean Association of Art Critics (2002), the Scholarship for Improvement in Audiovisual Media by the National Fund of Arts (2001), the scholarship at the Academy of Media Arts KHM in Germany and the Residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, both granted by the Antorchas Foundation (2004-2005), among others. She has published numerous books such as Ananké Asseff: Works 1999-2012 (2012), among others. She has been featured in important leading national and internationals publications such as Auto Focus, International Arte al Día, Face Contact, La Vanguardia Magazine, Mapas Abiertos, among others. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, United States and China. Nowadays, her work is part of important national and international collections such as Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires – MAMBA (Argentina), Museum of Fine Arts – MNBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), National Fund of Arts (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Palais de Glace (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Castagnino Museum + MACRO (Rosario, Argentina), Museum Emilio Caraffa (Córdoba, Argentina), Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam de La Habana (Cuba), Tate Modern (London, England), ARTER (Istambul, Turkey), among others.

Which is the worst menace? The existing one or the one we imagine? Or even worse: the one they want us to believe it does exist?

The fear of the wind is more ungraspable than wind itself, it runs through the fingers but also between thoughts, and however, it is present. It takes shape in an atrocious way from the fear of uncertainty (in some occasions, everything is uncertain), in the changes and movements, in the dreams and vigilant watch, in the imagination and the news which, upon the mass media insistence, all the time warns us about evil.

A made up fear, perhaps invented, an insecurity that shocks and worries in view of the unknown. There are too many signs going around, the multiplicity of contradictory messages, the doubts about reality and fiction.

And hiding seems like children attempting to escape: hiding under a blanket upon a phantasmagoric menace.

They take shape in Ananké´s corrimientos (shiftings), but she goes beyond that, although they turn towards her by her own choice of keeping a distance, of avoiding focusing the attention on her body to show the situations she is going through.

It is a look on what is felt. It deals with representing the changes -in a question of how to do it-, what will happen, externally and internally, in life or in films; in the natural disasters occurring in the world and in those shown by disaster films through special effects. A game between illusion, fantasy and construction.

How does the changing world modify us? How much does it modify what we have changed? Perhaps some answers may be found in the works. Or in some of the instructions such as “resist”.

At the same time, to show these situations, this time, it is a way of showing and hiding, of registering what will come, the unexpected. And, however, I ask myself: how much is it invention? how much is it true menace? I think about how much pain being imagined and suffered, how much existing and lost pain.

Ananké´s shiftings, questions and intuitions, with the mark of a small horrifying world watching us.

Rodrigo Alonso. The publication of a book containing an extensive body of work is an excellent opportunity to contemplate the different strategies, concerns and formal procedures that can be identified throughout. A large group of work allows for the delineation of a poetic sense that ceases to depend upon the specific circumstances in which each piece was produced, and as a result welcomes a more thorough comprehension of certain constants in your art practice.

In several of your photographic series, there is a provocative attitude, a confrontation with the viewer. Are you particularly interested in contemporary “aes­thetics of shock”, or is it, instead, a device you employ in order to involve viewers in the conflicts presented, a way to move the public?

Ananké Asseff. Ever since I began the search to de­fine myself as an author in photography in 1997, the camera has been a natural medium for communi­ca­tion and to manifest myself. I’ve had a hard life; I discovered the camera as a solitary way to hide, to denounce and to externalize all the emotions that I was going through. As a result, it became a weapon at times; at others, a witness, and it eventually wound up being a need. This is where I come from, this is the basis upon which all my work is constructed: from the denunciations that I was unable to shout to the fear, confinement and suffocation I felt. During the era of B., I almost couldn’t leave the house, unable to face the world. I studied in different studios (at the time, institu­tional education in Argentina was much more oriented toward the visual arts, not photography). During the first few years I resisted looking at other artists’ work because I didn’t want to be influenced by it, so I was not very aware of what was going on in contempo­rary art in general. I arrived at my own aesthetic by way of a combina­tion of intuition and necessity as dictated by my dis­course. In B., I wanted to explore prophylaxis, and this was the reason for scenes with few elements and the color white. At that time, the only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to hide and to scream at the same time. The viewer was fundamental, there had to be a recipient! If not, the denunciation wouldn’t exist. It was my pointed intention to evidence the gaze of the other—the viewer—and to achieve their complicity. This can also be seen in the frontal character of the self-portraits, which refer to forensic and police Here the person portrayed is the ac­cused, the suspect, but also possibly the victim. This continues in Mi retrato de familia [My Family Portrait]: at that time it was very intense to portray my family this way. It was a particularly difficult time. In Potencial [Potential], this frontal aspect per­ Here, however, it refers to an other who opens the door to the house and is standing there with a weapon. Producing these photos was a duel of sorts: the other with his or her weapon against me and mine (the camera). Justo Pastor Mellado told me that I was taking personal risks in this undertaking and in a certain sense he was right. When I was in the houses of these people with their weapons I would often find myself in an altered state (due to experi­ences I had suffered in the past), but it was some­thing that I needed to do. There is also an issue of power in question; there is a certain degree of violence in directing the pos­tures in which people will be portrayed in front of the There is something that has always fas­cinated me about photography: the photographer’s power to leave an imprint of his or her sensations and emotions in the image of the person portrayed. The imprint of my fear and my violence remained in them, and even in their own intimacy, they became objects of my discourse. This situation came about, however, in the middle of another provocative attitude that may have been a defense on their part, as if to say “this is my house, but you can’t come in because I’m armed”. It was all a negotiation. The testimonial (doc­­umentary) value of this project is very important. Weapons are very powerful fetish objects. But so is the camera.

Doesn’t the violence that clearly exists in your work wind up leaving its imprint (to use your expres­sion) on the viewer in the same way?

I think that it may, to a certain extent. I am in­ter­ested in who is looking and in what way they are look­ing. I want to create an impact on the viewer, to attract viewers, disquiet them and induce feelings of guilt… When I presented P. B., very interesting things happened. In general, women experienced under­stand­ing and remained, contemplating, and men quickly left the room. It was as if they wanted to look, but were invaded by the feeling that it “wasn’t cor­rect to look”. Or, on the contrary, the opposite also occurred—something that made me really angry!—where the images excited them instead. The victim-victimizer relationship always had a very strong presence.

In any case, it was a two-fold process of violence and identification. It’s natural that women would feel further implicated in your early works, where a gen­dered perspective is more evident, and that men would feel attacked in a certain way. They were not simply works about gender, but about gender-based violence.

Your observation regarding the sexuality of the gaze is meaningful, because it seems to me that it can still be perceived in your recent work, although the per­spective is different. The Bardo[9]series comes to mind, for example. I remember that you explained its origin to me, but I couldn’t help seeing a reference to La vuel­ta del malón [The Return of the Indian Raid, 1892] by Ángel Della Valle. The same is true with different pho­tos from the Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Paradise]series, where I recall one in particular that reminded me of Nymphe surprise [Surprised Nymph, 1861] by Edouard Manet. In both cases, the masculine gaze is central and the woman is basically an object that per­tains to the man and his gaze.Can we talk a bit about these series, your concept of bardo and of paradise, and whether or not you feel that the historical references are pertinent?

Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Paradise] came about in the wake of P. B., as if the confinement had shifted outside. Nature, which was my God, my ref­uge and my expansion, was suddenly tarnished. I couldn’t experience it as I had before. I didn’t feel safe anymore. I was bringing emotions along with me that were marks left by unfortunate personal experi­ences. The social context, which is never far removed, played its part: at that time there was a great insis­tence on levels of crime in Argentina and on global terrorism. During that era, I spent some time living in Germany (I had received a grant from KHM), and the lack of safety was palpable there as well, along with worries regarding the approach or presence of a foreign other (a sensation that was much stronger if the other in question had the appearance of being from the Middle East). All this was on the increase and sustained by the mass communication media’s insistence, instilling fear and terror in society. How alert we had to (and continue to need to) be in order not to succumb to these manipulations on an inti­mate level. Fear is an emotion felt on an individual basis, but constructed on a social level. It was then that I began to elaborate the Crímenes banales [Banal Crimes][10] project, which I did in paral­lel with Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Paradise], working simultaneously on the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. Every space was indis­criminately threatening; it was already within me. Nevertheless, beauty always was (and is) a great mit­igating factor, and how I needed that! In the Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Paradise] series, the menace is touched by beauty. The sinister co-exists with the sublime. When I found myself in natural settings, I would usually pack along my camera on any outing. One time in France, I walked hauling camera and tripod through the snow for eight hours until I felt the urge to take a photograph. I saw the scene and then com­mitted to it, literally body and soul. In general, this is the mechanism behind my work. In other cases, I would see the place and then return the next day to take the photo. I don’t quote other works in a direct way, but there are times when I find myself more closely involved in dialogues than I might imagine. This happened with the piece called Ἀνάγκη – Ananké es necesi­dad, lo ine­x­orable [Ἀνάγκη – Ananké is neces­sity, the inexo­rable] and the reference to La cautiva [The Captive]. I dreamt that scene one night. The dream was so in­tense and powerful, so sexual that when I woke up I made a sketch with all the details and didn’t stop until I had finally produced it. That happens to me quite a lot, that I just have to do some­thing, what­ever it takes. When an image insists, I have to see it resolved, though I may not know how. I often take risks, like in S/T (Corrimientos) [Untitled (Shifts)], where I climbed very high up in a tree while there was a puma in the tree right next to it. I went up in a crane, without harnesses or anything—none of that mattered to me! (now I’m beginning to un­der­stand that I should be more careful). In No quiero hablar de eso [I Don’t Want to Talk About It], I stretched out in the stagnant, putrid water and the interesting thing is that the work looks beautiful; does the putrid wa­ter contribute to that beauty?

The Corrimientos [Shifts] project is part of another phase that in my view—although there may be remis­sions and in many cases my style or aesthetic can be identified—deals with change. I felt the need to begin to move away from all the places that were already familiar to me and to a certain extent were becoming A profound questioning of my own work and of contemporary art emerged from within. I attempted to distance myself from the set formulas that I detect­ed in my working procedure; for example, I set myself the task of producing a body of photographs that did not respond to the “photographic series” concept in terms of reiterating technical or formal parameters. Each time I finished a piece, I had no idea what would follow. I gave myself the freedom to establish a dialog between pieces that did not respond directly to established conventions of co-existence. I gradually ceased to figure as subject in my works, and as I said to Fer­nando Farina one day, it wasn’t that I had wanted to be there, but that I hadn’t been able to leave!

Delving a bit deeper, I understood that it was a state of transition that I found (find) myself in, a dia­log with the Tibetan meaning of the term bardo, the project I’m currently working on. It is in this intermediate space (from the known to the unknown) that I stand right now. It is an intense exercise of position­ing myself on this site of internal and external push and pull; I try to motivate myself to observe it intimately, to feel it. On a personal level, it’s like a battle­ Working in this space may well be an imaginary way to alleviate the fear and uncertainty that this state provokes, a way to escape being overcome by paralysis.

Two- and three-dimensional images then appear; as I go along, I make the basic decisions necessary to arrive at the scene. In certain cases, such as Bardo I and Bardo II, it is the complexity of the production itself that brings on the accident that I value so highly in the images, something I discover once the mate­rial has been developed. I continue to work and to discover meanings. Bardo I is an uncomfortable im­age, without a clear direction. The viewer has “nothing to hold onto”; all is confusion. I’ve decided to sus­tain works that do not please because it is the state that I’m referring to. Bardo II offers the viewer more elements that they can relate to. Although there are tensions and struggles, there are also directions and more defined gestures; a dialogue with (Baroque) painting is established, something that I would dis­cover later. It’s wonderful…

This is how the historical references that you men­tion emerge in several of my works. Nymphe surprise [Surprised Nymph] fascinated me profoundly, very early on, and so it surely has some dialog with Retazos del Paraíso I [Remains of Paradise I]. I don’t rec­ognize influences in the other works on a conscious level, but I do consider myself to be permeable; as such it is quite feasible that they enter my uncon­ As much as we artists may maintain pre­tensions of originality, I believe that quotations and tendencies are always present on some level, it’s practically inevitable.

Since we’re talking about Nature, we could ex­pand a bit on the theme that appears with such force in your recent work. I think that Nature shows up in very different ways in it. Sometimes it’s as a kind of lost paradise, nostalgic or even bucolic; other times it’s the site of brutality or violence; at others it is the sce­nario for a more or less enigmatic occurrence, or an intimate environment. What would seem to have dis­ap­peared is the denunciation, although the photo­graphs in the Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Par­a­dise] se­ries persist with a sexuality of the gaze that is aimed once again at the uneasiness of modesty, em­phasizing the voyeurism implicit in the act of view­ing.

There is a similar uneasiness in watching the video Constelaciones [Constellations], although here it is re­lated instead to the identification process (with peo­ple who resist the inclemency of the water), and faced with the wall that obstructs a view of the landscape in the installation Sin título [Untitled] from the El mie­do al viento [Fear of the Wind][11] This topic resists disappearing from your work. In other cases, however, and primarily in Corri­mientos [Shifts], there are pieces that are much more enigmatic and open, where the meaning isn’t that clearly defined, or at least permits a more experi­mental approach. For example, the wave of mud and the photograph En el ademán de conducir nubes [On the Manner of Addressing Clouds] come to mind, and in particular the strange sculptural group that sets a man face to face with a tiger. I’d like to know to what extent this approach to Na­ture has added complexity to the semantic structures in your work and how they function; if we could I’d like to focus on this last work mentioned, which has been a true revelation in your work, and I would assume for you as well.

The common thread that runs throughout Corri­mientos [Shifts] is less visible than that of previous projects. I understand that what I propose is a more indirect reading, both of each work in itself and of the dialogue between them, and this is related to the questions and search that led me there. At the out­set it was a matter of “going along blindly” as Valeria Gonzalez[12] says. Then came an analysis and certain comprehension, and there I had to make decisions because it was risky: It took a lot of bravery!

I had just finished Crímenes banales [Banal Crimes, 2005-2007], and was coming from primarily photo­graphy and a strong, direct aesthetic of denunciation. At the same time I was working on Retazos del Para­íso [Remains of Paradise, 2004-2010], another (pho­tography) project that, as you say, dealt with the “voy­eurism in the act of viewing”. However, there was also Contemplación [Contemplation, 2005], an interactive video installation in which the approach of the un­known-other provokes an inversion of the gaze: the viewer looks at the work—the work looks at the view­ The relationship between the viewer (or interactor, strictly speaking) and the art object is echoed in the scene of the woman alone in the midst of Nature and her (quite alarmed) reaction to the approach of this unknown-other; the relationship is presented in terms of proxemics.

I was living in connection with fear and threats at the time, and didn’t see any other possibility. I need­ed to get away from that; it was a vital question… I would ask myself: do artists always have to suffer? I still ask myself: is this a question that is no longer current?

Corrimientos [Shifts] signified an attempt to move away from places already familiar and/or harmful to me. I think it’s important to try not to repeat yourself. I worked on one piece at a time, without falling back on the mechanics of a procedure used with conti­ In my current work, if there are reiterations, I try to make sure that they are truly justified. It often happens that I don’t understand why I need to work with certain elements, as is the case with Bardo, the project I’m immersed in right now. Why do horses appear in the different pieces? Today it’s an enigma to me, but I’m sure that I’ll understand it better fur­ther on. It’s amazing; comprehension emerges later, and very often a review, an analytical text or some comment may help me to understand—and to under­stand myself.

Everything comes from deep down inside. As I mentioned to you earlier, there are images that appear insistently, and if it is with great force, in the end I have to bring them to fruition. On an intimate level, I am always permeated (as a social being) by issues coming from the context and this always winds up being present in my work (in one way or another). I believe that we are living in an era of unprecedented I could list an enormous number of things, or just mention determined territories, such as climatic, political, economic, social or technological change; in addition you have the insistence of the media. As Leonor Arfuch[13] says, “certain registers of contem­porary communication, the insistence of the media and the articulation of certain issues allow for a tendentious definition—and construction—of con­sen­sus, beliefs and shared sentiments that invade structures of intimacy and family, intruding easily into our personal histories”.

In Corrimientos [Shifts], I worked with systems and media utilized in the industrial audiovisual field to recreate credible worlds. In several cases, as in the photograph No está hecho para sufrir [Not Made to Suffer], the mechanism is plainly visible. For this project, I turned to direct photography, analog media and performance. Metaphor and the accidental are also present. El secreto tenía que develarse [The Se­cret Had to Be Unveiled] shows something that is happening that could well mean the destruction of the underpinning that sustains us, the instability that emerges when everything explodes… Obviously, a different context would instigate other possible read­ They’re different instances-layers of the same thing. Nevertheless, my intention is not that my works be read in such and such a way; I know that some ideas are quite concealed. Besides, here I am, mak­ing the public uneasy, inciting them to move away from the place they know well in order to be able to interact with something different that the work or group of works propose (without the restrictions men­tioned previously).

I was working with Nature, and then the animals came along. Despertando al tigre [Waking the Tiger] is my first three-dimensional work. The truth is that it was ex­tremely difficult to do, but I didn’t abandon the under­taking because the image was so powerful within me; I told myself: you must do this! Yet at the same time, I would ask myself why, what does a tiger mean face to face with the person in this scene? And I began to understand that these animals have a symbolism that has to do with taking on leadership over themselves. This is a very powerful destiny in terms of one’s self, as is the possibility of taking it on, of appropriating this personal power. In general, we live without doing so, and this is why we are par­alyzed in the face of our own potential as individ­uals, our eyes wide open, self-absorbed, our fists clenched… The tiger inexorably approaches the man. There is a secret communication between them, as well as silence and materiality. One tends to look for an immediate relationship: the beast attacks the man. But the animal’s jaws are not open; it doesn’t look as if it’s about to at­ It’s similar to what takes place in the photograph Sin título (Corrimientos) [Untitled (Shifts)], where the puma attempts to climb up a different tree than the one holding the person; here, the viewer has to make an effort in order to replace the missing nar­rative, perhaps opening the way for other poetic possibilities. Fear and menace continue to be present in my work, but regarding a different area of discourse.When Fernando Farina invited me to carry out an exhibition project specifically for the Arte en la Torre space that pertains to Fundación YPF, I felt that I was facing an enormous challenge. I had never de­vel­oped site-specific works prior to that moment, and that is why I was so interested in the process that was headed my way. When I visited the exhibition space, the first thing that came to mind was an im­age of the Río de la Plata (so nearby), bursting vio­lently into the hall. After all, who says that a tsunami couldn’t come in from the river, that the river wouldn’t recover what we have taken away?

The exhibition is called El miedo al viento [Fear of the Wind]. The proximity of the Río de la Plata and the exhibition space in a corporate building—a 30-story tower constructed by one of the world’s most fa­mous architects[14]—motivated me to assemble a gigantic mud wave that erupts into the space, ready to fall onto viewers. One person who went to visit the exhibition told me: “This gives us a notion of dimension, of how small we humans are in the face of Nature’s power” and used the term “Pachamama-esque”[15] in referring to the work. In turn, another per­son interpreted it as a political dialogue in the context of the company. To a certain extent, it was a premonitory work… Inundations had already appeared in other proj­ects, such as the video performance Constelaciones [Constellations].

During the process of mounting the show, when Despertando al tigre [Waking the Tiger] arrived, we saw how the wave emphasized the ferocity of the tiger and the man remained standing there, increas­ingly weak in the face of all this: animal and Nature. There was also an interesting dialogue between chrome’s polished shine and the precarious nature of clay. At any rate, given the limitations of the space, the idea was to circulate within the space, experi­encing one work at a time, and that the group as a whole would enable readings that intersect and resig­nify one another.

I’m still thinking about the idea of the river reclaiming what pertains to it, and naturally, I can’t help but connect this with the notion of denunciation that frequently recurs in your words and is evidenced in your early photographs. In a text that I assume was written by you, one part reads: “Fear as violence, alien­ation as protection, rights as dignity, identity as risk, fragility as deception”. Now I’d like to focus on the last phrase.

I suppose that when someone makes a denunci­ation, it is because they believe that a right exists, and that it is being sullied. And if the denunciation is really made, if someone musters the courage to do so, it is because fragility has been pushed aside in order to adopt an active attitude; here there is a word that comes to mind that I particularly like; it sounds a bit odd in its Spanish translation but it’s used quite a bit in the area of civil rights and sociology: empow­erment (empoderamiento). Your work clearly has to do with power; more specif­ically, with power struggles. As Michel Foucault stat­ed, people don’t possess power, they exercise it. But we’re not talking about power struggles in the classic sense of conflict between social classes here, but rather in a more biopolitical sense, where even the river stakes a claim: a power that pertains to Nature, a power that pertains to life, a power of gender, a pow­er of the weakest, a power of representation…The question would be this: What place do you as­sign to this power of representation in your work? Do you believe that it is capable of having an effect, that it can induce some kind of empowerment? I’m not talking about changing people’s lives, but perhaps, in the fragility of the act of contemplation, moving them to adopt some kind of attitude, that the arena of rep­resentation might be understood as a site of struggle (what we spoke of earlier regarding violence toward the spectator comes to mind here). Should we hope that the man facing the tiger will wake up? Otherwise his fragility is, in fact, a deception…

In the text from P. B. that you quote, I use the words “en tanto” (in terms of) as a poetic space: fearin terms of violence, alienation in terms of protec­tion… For me, this differs from the direct meaning of “como” (as). These phrases rather propose a re­lationship between two intertwined concepts, closer to rights in relation to dignity, to fragility in the face of deception. I’m not sure whether or not fragility re­mains outside of a denunciation, I rather think that it forms part of it. Sometimes suffocation leads you to shout because you can’t stand it any more, and that shout helps you to raise yourself up. But we know that nothing is achieved with the relief of the shout alone; in order to make it more effective, this cry has to be transformed aesthetically. This opera­tion, then, could be read as the empowerment that you mention.

I believe that representation is a powerful weap­ In regard to the uncertainty between reality and fiction, “we know that language does not represent, but rather constitutes reality”[16]. As Farina says, “there are too many symbols in circulation, the multiplicity of contradictory messages, doubts regarding reality and fiction”; he also speaks of “play between illusion, fantasy and construction”.[17]I want to awaken, if only all of us might wake up! But it’s a very scary thing to do. Big changes put us face to face with that situation, facing the tiger. Fra­gility may well be a self-deception, or at times, the product of manipulation. I hope that these works manage to formulate questions that might allow us to decipher extreme states of vulnerability, or to show us what great strength we have to work our way through these processes of transformation.

[9]1. According to Tibetan tradition, bardo (Bardo Thodol) means “intermediate state”, also translated as “state of transition between life and death” (between one life and the following one). However, this term can also be applied to any transitional experience, any state of existence between two others.

The most interesting thing originated by the intersection between Conceptual art and Feminism during the seventies was not the long iconographic succes­sion of women disguised as men or sporting phallic appendages. These were mirror reversions that, in­stead of displacing the social stereotype that assigns sexual identity to an anatomical destiny, reinforced it with transpositions of attributes that did nothing to modify the binary concept of gender difference. The most interesting thing to have emerged was a small number of works that examined the history of Western visual representation as a site where roles were inequitably distributed, as a device based on the distinction between a subject/author who looks and the object of his attention. The theory of the mascu­line gaze (and its counterpart, the sexual objectifica­tion of women) that came out of feminist film studies provided artists with a methodological framework.

The first works exhibited by Ananké Asseff reveal an unequivocal adscription to this historical line of conceptual thought. The artist burst onto the local art scene in the late nineties with a surprisingly decid­ed and mature production. Some of the images that she would later group under the title P. B. em­ploy themes of sexual violence in order to raise ethical sus­­picions regarding the gaze. “Prohibido violar” [Rape Prohibited] reads the inscription that the art­ist holds up in front of the camera. As Spinoza said with provocative common sense, if I am prohibited from doing something, it is because it is something that I can do. It is the prohibition that introduces the menace of violation into the scene. The main character slips into a protective shell in the form of a moral statement, but at the same time offers herself up to the gaze in accordance with the rules of the most absolute availability (actual size and a frontal pose). The ambiguity of the defiant, vulnerable character is transferred to the viewer, seduced and guilty. The image is both tense and beautiful, well targeted and disturbing.

In a diptych, Ananké Asseff paired a white glove and a pair of white, slightly damp underpants. Here are two corporal metonymies, displaced symbols that allude to that which they cover: an anonymous hand and female genitals. The two elements side by side are separated; the contact is simultaneously suggested and suspended. More than a question of reducing sexual desire to ideograms, the diptych evokes the isolated traces of a police investigation. While underwear is destined to dress and protect private parts, a glove serves to cover a criminal’s tracks. The work’s strict monochrome scheme also evokes the desire to produce a blank in someone’s memory. Several of the images in P. B. include objects that denote the asepsis of medical and scientific devices. In one of the self portraits, an oppressive bandage is used to “erase” the anatomical evidence of a female body.

In feminist conceptualism during the seventies, some artists went from the nude to the act of being stripped nude, from the passive pose to the ag­gression of confrontation. In another image in P. B., instead of showing us her back (that other side of beauty) Ananké Asseff turns her back on us. The firmness of this almost tangible reluctance charges our gaze with violence. This is because by showing her back (Velázquez, Ingres, Man Ray and so many others…) the woman is resolved as the complacent object of the desiring gaze that constitutes her. By turning her back on us in front of a strict, white plane—almost like a prisoner up against a wall—the artist’s gaze is directed outside the frame but re­bounds like an energy contained within the exitless space to challenge us. Ananké Asseff wrote: I looked at her eyes and between her legs, as both photo­grapher and subject being photographed in response to a defiant verbal game rehearsed with Marcelo Franco. A poetry of cruelty reflects the violence of sexual domination, which is also that of representa­tional devices.[14] Linguist Emile Benveniste discovered that there are only two persons in language, you and I, in the act of dialogue: he (she) deals with the per­son we are talking about, an object of discourse. The tension in the situation evoked lies in the fact that the body and between those legs cannot be fixed in the place of object so long as there are eyes that return the gaze.

The backs that appear in a body of works grouped under the title Retazos del Paraíso [Remains of Para­dise] are different, almost the complete opposite. In three photographs, No quiero hablar de eso [I Don’t Want to Talk About It], Retazos del Paraíso II [Remains of Paradise II] and Línea de ribera [River Shoreline], the main character ignores our gaze, in her own world, merging harmoniously with the idyllic landscape that surrounds and contains her. A similar image constitutes the point of departure for the video installation Contemplación [Contemplation], but here, the tempo­ral nature of the film support allows Asseff to further develop the device. In the first scene, the woman is seated before a lake in a forest that generously opens before her eyes. The scene affirms beauty as a state of wholeness that is foreign to us (Walter Benjamin defined aura exactly that way: to perceive the remoteness of a phenomenon, however close it may be). If, as a viewer, I keep myself at a preven­tative distance, the scene survives, it is maintained. If I approach it, a sensor activates a second scene in the video: the woman turns around and looks at the viewer. As in the mythological tales of nymphs taken by surprise, we feel as though our gaze were an abduction. Proximity is a threat. Sensor: censor. Our desire to look makes us responsible for having disrupted that intimate paradise.

Nevertheless, this rupture is inevitable: Paradise does not reach us except by way of its remains, as Asseff affirms in the series’ title. The intrinsic coexistence of the landscape’s beauty and the threat evolves in the scene itself (the body submitted to the freezing cold and to the dense, thorny vegetation) or by way of the same view, embodied by the camera.

Potencial [Potential], Vigilia [Vigil] and Rueda de reco­nocimiento [Lineup] constitute a third group, gath­ered under the generic title Crímenes banales [Banal Crimes][17]. Here, the artist disappears as the main character and the handling of violence goes beyond sexual implications. Asseff photographed and filmed people who live with firearms in their houses.

We know that language does not represent, but rather constitutes reality. Initiated in 2005, the pro­duction of this work emerged at a moment in which the communication media had established the lack of safety as an important line of discourse. These pieces do not allude to the degree of danger as a concrete phenomenon, but to what extent concern over the lack of safety took on a very concrete pres­ence at a particular historical moment, articulating how a majority of people would perceive reality, in a range that spanned diverse social classes. The con­struction of a discourse of danger originates forms of subjectivity that are articulated in relation to the feeling of fear. It also generates specific forms of behavior. Firstly, tasks of control are distributed by capillary action to each and every citizen, and there is a preventative isolation between people (ties be­tween neighbors are destroyed): every other becomes suspect. Secondly, conduct in adherence to the re­pressive structure of power is reinforced: there are demands for increased police control, etc.

The theme in Asseff’s work is paranoia. Her titles infallibly hit the mark. Potencial [Potential] and Vigi­lia [Vigil] refer to states of suspense. The danger is there, not as an occurrence, but as a hypothesis. It is the supposition of imminent danger that charges these scenes with tension, scenes that on the other hand are resolved as familiar, domestic scenarios in accordance with portraiture’s classic typology. These are people from the middle class and upper middle class. According to the socially stereotyped view of violence, a weapon is practically an epithet or “nat­ural attribute” of a marginal (or dangerous) person. Asseff’s photographs are both caustic and ambig­uous because they take from the historical decorum of the portrait genre, which came into being as an expression of the 15th Century Italian and Flemish mercantile bourgeoisie.

The video language in Vigilia [Vigil] allows us to perceive a slow distillation of this empty, exasperat­ing time. Justo Pastor Mellado observed an analogy between the firing of a projectile and the action of the photographic shutter.[18] These characters are subordinated two fold, by the proximity of a weapon and by the camera that films them. Like some kind of household cold war, the aggressiveness implicit in the immobile expectation of self defense conduct falls into the same rhythm as the passing of the night.

Rueda de reconocimiento [Lineup] is another in­tel­ligent title. While on the one hand it is a literal description of the police procedure used to identify criminals that the installation replicates, on the other hand it calls attention to symbolic associations that are set into motion by implicating the viewer in a play of mirrors. Here, the circular aspect of the rueda [translator’s note: a literal translation of the title would be round of recognition] becomes a perturbing reversibility between victims and victimizers. This is also the case in the video Non specific Threat, by Willie Doherty, where a camera that spins 360° and texts in the second person are articulated not in order to identify a single suspect, but to warn us that we are all (us and them) tangled up in the same web as the discursive objects of an ubiquitous, anon­ymous system based on reproducing fear.

Corrimientos [Shifts] is the key word that has guided the most recent phase of Ananké Asseff’s pro­duc­tion. If violence assumed sexual iconography at the outset and later took on a social incarnation, in this most recent phase the menace and the danger—and the fear that they provoke—are more indeter­minate. El miedo al viento [Fear of the Wind] is the name the artist used for one of her latest exhibitions. In the exhibition catalog, Fernando Farina stated that “the wind has no face”.[20] The destructive power of the forces of Nature or the animal kingdom has a logic all its own that is often mysterious and basically in­different to human culture’s ethical parameters.[21]

In 2011, certain themes or situations that were already present in determined photographs emigrat­ed to new formats, such as sculpture or installation. Aside from the surprise that this other “shift” may have caused in a public accustomed to cataloging Ananké Asseff as a “photographer”, a profound con­ceptual coherence provides these diverse pieces with a sense of unity. The menacing potential of the large wave of mud (Sin título [Untitled], 2011) comes from the sensation of a moment that has been froz­en or brought to a halt, identical to the capture of a photograph. While in previous photographs such as El secreto tenía que develarse [The Secret Had to Be Unveiled] or En el ademán de conducir nubes [On the Manner of Addressing Clouds], the direct shot point­ed to the explosive climax, on the other hand, in this enormous instal­la­tion that the exhibition space seems too small to con­tain, the cataclysm is sus­pend­ed, like the blood­shed in the Potencial [Poten­tial] series, featuring in­teriors and weapons.

The male figure in Despertando al tigre [Waking the Tiger] also presents an intrinsic link with photo­graphy’s genesis, given that the sculptural copy, made with molds taken directly from nature, is an indicative procedure.[22] Nevertheless, the instant detained in this scene is more disturbing and complex than the wave on the verge of breaking. It is more difficult to imagine this moment as a frame within a time based sequence, it’s difficult to image what may have taken place before and what might happen next. The con­frontation between the young man and the tiger occurs at a moment that is simultaneously singular and eternal. It is an event with metaphysical weight. It is possible that its formal similarity to Jeff Koons’ hyperrealist sculptures with chromefinish surfaces leads us nowhere, given that the North American artist would carry on the obviousness inherited from Pop Art. As he stroked the black fur, it occurred to him that the contact was illusory, that they were sep­arated by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in succession, while the magic animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.[23] Visual unity and coexistence in space do not suffice to naturalize the meeting between man and animal, both of whom remain—just like Borges’ Mr. Dahlmann and black cat from “El Sur” [The South]—separated by an invisible halo. The beast’s attitude is not one of attack and the man’s reaction is not one of fear or a state of alert. Is this about the potential forces of a confron­tation that will take place, or will the meditated domain over the savage traits of the body continue forever? Is the tiger that awakens to be found in front of the young man, or is it purely a projection of his desire?

5.

We have discussed the coherence that governs Ananké Asseff’s production, whether she is using photography or not. This coherence is not the result of a strategy established ahead of time, but of dif­ferent leaps that she ventures to take, moments of true “blindness” where the only solid ground is an insistent image that precedes any assignation of meaning. For the artist, the construction of meaning is a task that involves confronting the void that lies in wait at the end of each illumination.

This is why she decided to include an authentic zone of risk in this retrospective book: her latest work, carried out at the same time as this publica­tion. Bardo, in its most popular local usage, con­notes the idea of a “complete mess”, something that we could link to the iconography of the two photo­graphs. The characters are authentic agonists, they are locked in a struggle whose cause and aims are un­known to us; nevertheless, we feel its intensity. There is some­thing beastly that echoes throughout the scene where human beings and horses mingle. Bardo I has a com­pact, rectangular composition of figures and the me­diation between this formal order and the agitation of the theme revealed within it winds up being al­most awkward; Bardo II proceeds with focal points of tension placed in opposition, han­dled in a more Baroque manner. Both are complex and evoke mul­tiple chords of resonance with art his­tory, most nota­bly with the central panel of Uccello’s triptych of the battle of San Romano, whose wild horse with its fe­rocious teeth undoubtedly left its mark on Picasso’s Guernica as well. The black and white palette that distances us from reality’s proxim­ity was used pre­viously only in the case of Ἀνάγκη – Ananké es necesi­dad, lo ine­x­orable [Ἀνάγκη – Ananké is neces­sity, the inexo­rable], which names both the artist and necessity. This dis­tance can also lead us back into Argentina’s history, to symbolic landmarks such as La cautiva[24] or El matadero[25]. In its Celtic or­­i­gin, bardo (bard) refers to a poet who narrates a sto­ry. The meaning that most captivated Asseff’s thoughts is that which comes from El libro tibetano de los muertos [The Tibetan Book of the Dead][26]: there, bardo designates a vital intermediate state, one of transition. This is precisely the zone of risk, the abyss of sorts that opens up be­tween one link and the next in this artist’s creative process. It may be this ambiguous moment of lucid­ity, blindness and illumination that winds up being embodied in the sculpture of the young mare emerg­ing from the primordial earth or irremediably sinking into it. It is significant that this existential metaphor by the art­ist is the one that concludes the book that comes into being today.

[17]. Banal crimes: “Denomination used by experts (police, inves­tigators) to refer to deaths caused by firearms that do not occur during instances of robbery, but of personal conflicts, acci­dents and suicides (Argentina’s Ministry of Justice)”.

[18]. Discussion in the context of the Intercampos program, Fun­dación Telefónica de Argentina, Buenos Aires, 2006.

[21]. During the sixties decade, German Gerhard Richter re­sponded to Warhol’s series of Disasters, provoked by human negligence, by appropriating the news of a death caused by the fracturing of an iceberg.

[22]. Duchamp was able to draw relevant conclusions on the basis of the similarity between sculptural molds and photo­graphy, as is especially evident during the years that he was elaborating Étant donnés.

[25]. El matadero [The Slaughterhouse]: story by Esteban Echeve­rría (Argentina), published in 1871.

[26]. In Tibetan, the title is Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Thodol literally means liberation through hearing. Bardo means “between two”: bar means “between”; do means “two”. It refers to emancipation achieved by way of compre­hension that arises during the intermediate state, as a state of transition between one life and the next.